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  • ”We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children.”
    – Joe Romm
    physicist
  • ”Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
    – Edward Abbey
  • ”On the one hand, it’s politically impossible to stop growth. On the other hand, it’s biophysically impossible to continue it ad infinitum. So, which impossibility is fundamentally impossible?”
    – Herman Daly
    former World Bank senior economist
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”In the short term, we must realize that we have better ways to create jobs and build the economy than holding an everything must go sale on our precious resources.”
    – Dr. David Suzuki
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”This is not about whales anymore. It’s about us.”
    – Thomas Friedman
  • ”We can’t frack our way back to economic prosperity; nor can we unplug a coal plant, plug in a solar panel, and go on expanding population and consumption.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”Long-term sustainability requires a materially smaller economy (the pie) shared more equitably (not equally) by a smaller population.”
    – William Rees
    Co-originator of Ecological Footprint Analysis
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”The inescapable failure of a society built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth’s living systems are the overwhelming facts of our existence.”
    – George Monbiot
    Guardian columnist
  • ”We can’t frack our way back to economic prosperity; nor can we unplug a coal plant, plug in a solar panel, and go on expanding population and consumption.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”Population is the multiplier of everything we do wrong.”
    – Dr. Martha M. Campbell
  • ”There will inevitably come a time that the society drastically needs to change the way it interacts with the environment, or it will lose its coherence.”
    – Sander van der Leeuw
  • ”We’re going to need some kind of radical break with our past behavior if we’re to engineer a viable future.”
    – Mark Buchanan
    Bloomberg columnist
  • ”Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
    – E.F. Schumacher
    author: Small is Beautiful
  • ”As I see it, humanity needs to reduce its impact on the Earth urgently and there are three ways to achieve this: we can stop consuming so many resources, we can change our technology and we can reduce the growth of our population.”
    – Sir David Attenborough
  • ”We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    economist
  • ”We can share the earth and take care of it together, rather than trying to possess it, destroying the beauty of life in the process.”
    – Dalai Lama
  • ”At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds, people with a new vision. It will not be saved by people with the old vision but new programs.”
    – Daniel Quinn
    author: Ishmael and The Story of B
  • ”The free-market fundamentalists will tell you that more growth, more stuff and 9 billion people going shopping is the best we can do. They’re wrong. We can be more. We can be much more.”
    – Paul Gilding
    author: The Great Disruption
  • ”Who’s gonna stand up and save the Earth? Who’s gonna say that she’s had enough?”
    – Neil Young
  • ”If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds, people with a new vision. It will not be saved by people with the old vision but new programs.”
    – Daniel Quinn
    author: Ishmael and The Story of B
  • ”We’ve globalized an utterly untenable economic model of hyperconsumerism. It’s now successfully spreading across the world, and it’s killing us.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    economist
  • ”The truth is this: the Earth cannot provide enough food and fresh water for 10 billion people, never mind homes, never mind roads, hospitals and schools.”
    – Richard Branson
  • ”There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.”
    – Mahatma Ghandhi
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
    – Kenneth Boulding
    economist
  • ”In today’s full world, resources are not only scarce but have become the limiting factor”
    – Herman Daly
    former World Bank senior economist
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”Because of this civilization’s obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable. We simply cannot go on living this way.”
    – Adam Sacks
  • ”I have – over the last five years – quite rapidly become a Malthusian. I have been won over by the data, and I have been won over by the logic of the math.”
    – Jeremy Grantham
    investment strategist
  • ”I have – over the last five years – quite rapidly become a Malthusian. I have been won over by the data, and I have been won over by the logic of the math.”
    – Jeremy Grantham
    investment strategist

Are GrowthBusters Modern Hippies?

I was recently interviewed by Modern Hippie Mag. Founder and editor Jaszy McAllister has become a fan of the GrowthBusters film project. You can listen to the interview here on Modern Hippie Radio.

Jaszy founded Modern Hippie Mag to “share a love for all things ‘green’, conscious living, and sustainability.” That was enough to get my interest. I’ve been following Modern Hippie for several months now and have gained some useful information to help me reduce my impact at home.


JaszySmall1

Modern Hippie has a variety of talented writers, publishes daily and weekly newsletters, shares interviews on Modern Hippie Radio, and provides video updates on Modern Hippie TV. . . .

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Growth-Worship Kool-Aid in the Local Papers

The newest GrowthBusters podcast is available now on NextGen. Thanks to NextGen’s Steve Zuckerman for making this soap box available to me. I encourage you to check out the thoughtful, outside-the-box programming at NextGen.

This week’s podcast is the audio version of a blog I posted last week about pro-growth propaganda found in my hometown newspaper. If you’d rather listen than read, then here’s your chance. I will ocassionally do a podcast and/or blog post highlighting such examples of growth-worship programming in the media. I am certain that as more and more of us become aware of what’s in the Kool-Aid we are served, the power of that propaganda will diminish. Good listening… . . .

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Newspaper Celebration of Population Growth Perpetuates Cultural Myth

It’s my mission to point out the programming that keeps our culture speeding toward a cliff, fueled by its destructive addiction to MORE. My radar is finely tuned to pick up not just themes and premises, but even the subtleties of word selection that reinforce our society’s belief that bigger is better. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes not so subtle. Ocassionally I get a little cranky that so many cannot yet see what I call “growthism” in news reports, headlines, editorials and even television commercials. I get even crankier toward those who keep creating and serving this Kool-Aid.


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I try to be diplomatic when drawing attention to examples of growthism Kool-Aid. After all, most who drink it – and many who serve it – are blissfully unaware of its toxic ingredients. They don’t realize we are members of a cult – the cult of growth, and when we swallow the Kool-Aid we are making a suicide pact. Forgive me for being tough on my hometown newspaper today. This is going to be a cranky moment. . . .

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Walking the Walk While Talking the Talk

In making a film about becoming a sustainable civilization, it is far too easy to focus on the big picture – the changes needed in our consumptive, growth-worshipping system – and ignore individual behavior. I am certainly guilty of excusing, say, a filming trip by airplane to Toronto or Los Angeles, as a worthwhile environmental sacrifice. If the GrowthBusters film helps our society get unhooked from its growth addiction, the oil consumption and carbon emissions of that flight will have been worth it.

jet-airplanePerhaps true, but this fascinating piece (Flying Is One of the Worst Things You Can Do for the Environment — So Why Do So Many Well-Intentioned Folks Do It?) on AlterNet raises some salient points about how many of us make decisions like this every day. This article points out that those of us who are hanging our clothes on the line, riding our bikes or walking, and eschewing paper napkins, etc. are among the first to hop on a jet for a trip to an activist gathering in D.C. or Cancun or Copenhagen. I think we have to change, and in fact I am working on that. A year ago I spent 24 days on the U.S. East Coast shooting interviews and b-roll in order to do that shooting with just one round-trip by air. I’ve enlisted the help of filmmakers and journalists in London, Delhi, Bangkok, Addis Ababa and Sydney so I could avoid trans-ocean flights (working on a shoestring budget made it that much easier to do the right footprint-minimizing thing). . . .

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Musicians: GrowthBusters Earth Day Fundraiser Soundtrack Needs You

Many musicians, upon hearing about the GrowthBusters film, have offered their music and talents to the project. So I’ve decided a neat way to honor them is to release a special soundtrack album of music inspired by or inspiring the film. If you’ve recorded a song relevant to sustainability, consumption, sufficiency, simplicity, overpopulation or urban growth, and you’d like to contribute it to the album, please let me know.

GrowthBusters-Soundtrack-Album-Cover-2

We hope to have the album available for digital download or CD purchase shortly before Earth Day in April. Proceeds will help fund completion of the documentary, thus honoring the intent of the musicians wanting to use their artistry to help us in our mission. So send us yours. Who knows, maybe we’ll want to include your song in the film! If we select your song, we’ll do our best to get your music heard and appreciated, including a brief bio and a link to your music site. . . .

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